Re: [ARSCLIST] The case for message boards.

[David Breneman <david_breneman@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Brandon Burke <burke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> * There are entirely too many private conversations on this list;
> that is, conversations consisting of several posts but only three
> or
> four participants. Other than some obvious exceptions,
> conversations
> of this order are generally inappropriate for a public forum.

I think it's a mistake to correlate the number of people
posting to a thread with the number of people reading the
thread.  I don't post very often to this list, but I do
read a lot of threads anyway,

> * Search: As i mentioned earlier, and others have agreed with me,
> the search function of the ARSClist archives is a wreck. Results
> are
> displayed at the message-level, meaning that tracing back the
> chronological order of a thread is both a guessing game and often
> impossible since any one email can have multiple replies.

I've never tried to search the archives, but maybe what's
needed is a better archive search feature rather than a
wholesale replacement of the mailing list with a bulletin
board.

> (Email is
> web-like in this way, whereas message boards simply display each
> reply in chronological order. End of story.)

This is entirely dependant on the type of software used
for the searches.  There is nothing about the nature of
email that makes it more or less easy to search than
other means of communication.

> * Print: Your email client's "sort" function does nothing but group
> all
> messages with a like subject line together, meaning it is still
> impossible
> to print the entire contents of any one thread without repeating
> several messages and wasting a lot of paper in the process.

This may be an issue with your mail reader.  If I print a
message, I get a printout of that message, not a lot of
unintended ones, and I'm currently using a pretty
boneheaded (read: graphical interface) mail reader: Yahoo.
When I ran my own mail server I used elm, but the explosion
of HTML in email (for which I blame AOL and Microsoft, in
no partcular order) in addition to spam, led me reluctantly
to go with a commercial web-based product.

> Let me pose the question again: is this list a country club or are
> we
> providing a service for the sound collections community?

It's a service for the sound collections community.
It will be less of a service in my eye if it becomes
a bulletin board, but I'm sure my line of reasoning 
impresses you about as much as yours impresses me. :-)


David Breneman         david_breneman@xxxxxxxxx


 
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